Sergiobelinchn

Who can forget the opening scenes of those classic “spaghetti westerns” from the nineteen-sixties and seventies starring Clint Eastwood that were directed by the Italian master, Sergio Leone? Eastwood, “the man with no name,” riding with his serape, his gun, and his cigarillo into some small town, all adobe and split wood, with its cantinas, church, well and boardinghouses―Santa Anna, San Miguel, it doesn’t matter―in A Fistful of Dollars or the legendary The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: who can forget? Certainly not Sergio Belinchón.

Belinchón has been known for his depictions of built environments and empty, sterile spaces, albeit evocatively photographed, in Rome and Berlin among other places he visited between 1999 and 2002. More recently, however, he has embarked upon a trilogy that explores not just the space itself and the traces left by human presence but of space and time as metaphor. With Once upon a Time, Western, and Paraíso photographed from 2003 to the present, Belinchón has begun to explore memory and representation in a dialogue with photography and film.

Both Once upon a Time and Western are symbolically connected. In the former, Belinchón photographed in Yeniseisk, a small mining town in Siberia, that bears an uncanny visual resemblance to small towns in the American Southwest where, theoretically, the “spaghetti westerns” are set. However, far from being photographed in Arizona, Texas, or California, Leone chose to shoot in Almería, Spain.

These towns, mirror images of each other, one a stage set standing in for nameless towns in America, and the other real, both partake of the same style construction—minus the adobe buildings in the case of Yeniseisk. They were founded approximately at the same time in the mid-nineteenth century at a time when the United States and Czarist Russia were expansionist powers settling new frontiers. Once upon a Time consists of an installation of some thirty images shot in Russia that appear to be set in some timeless past. Belinchón, however, includes modern details such as telephone lines, air conditioners, TV aerials, and the occasional Lada car. They represent the Russian frontier then and now and evoke a past similar to the Wild West days in America. Belinchón writes, “Playing with appearances interests me . . . Presented in old used frames, the photographs have an aged look to them, as if they were images from one hundred years ago. This impression is further enhanced by the buildings themselves.”

This level of representation is reflected in Belinchón’s images from Almería that fulfill our expectations of what an American frontier town should look like. He adds that he is referring “not just [to] the studios built especially for the movies, now a kind of tourist theme park, but all the roads, houses, and towns where he filmed.” We all but expect to see cowboys shooting one another and barroom brawls in the cantinas, just like in A Fistful of Dollars. Belinchón cues his manipulations of appearance and reality through the “visual trickery,” as he puts it, of digital manipulation and distorted super 8 film. Now scarcely used, these sets do indeed resemble some lost town in Arizona that is fast becoming “a ghost town and returning back to the landscape.” These images and the settings he photographed seem more real than real. We are able to recognize what they represent because we have seen them before in the movies where they have been engraved on our memory.

Belinchón’s trilogy is ultimately a journey into the visual imagination. The themes of representation and travel are unpacked and re-arranged by narrative sequence and visual quoting. The images we have in our heads are more potent than actual lived reality. We recognize places now not because we have already been there but because we have always already seen the pictures. We go to places now just to confirm what we already know. Seeing is believing, but believing does not necessarily have anything to do with reality. The manipulated films, like the film sets of Almería and the village of Yeniseisk, are so faded and distorted that only the memory traces seem real. We can scarcely recognize the places in the films. These days, with Photoshop readily available, even photographic evidence is as unstable and fleeting as a fading memory. Were we really there? Who knows? We can no longer say. Once upon a time is how the best fairy tales begin, and so it is with Belinchón.